The Naked Dawn (1955) The fascinating rogue, the unsatisfied wife and the hipocrite husband. You've seen it already but not staged on the mexican border, with Arthur Kennedy playing (convincingly: maybe because I saw the movie dubbed in spanish) a mexican. It's all so ridiculous and, like most of noires, boring. 5\10

Good for TV standards, it will not disappoint you if you wanna kill an hour or so, just don't expect it to come anywhere near Rutger Hauer's 80s vehicle. They go in circles with the story and there's a bump on more than one place. Can't complain 'bout the actors.

Fury - 7/10 - Fritz Lang's first Hollywood film if I'm not mistaken. Although it's very well-made and has its share of powerful sequences, particularly the Brooke Hart-inspired lynching scene, I find the central conceit of the film pretty hard to swallow and that takes it down a notch. The loud speech-making and neon-light messages in the second half hurt it too, well-delivered though they generally are.

The Black Book (aka Reign of Terror) - 9/10 - A really dark and nasty noir set in Revolutionary France, directed by Anthony Mann. John Alton's cinematography is amazingly claustrophobic and nightmarish, and the movie has a real sense of danger and violence to the whole thing. Great cast too, especially Arnold Moss (?) as the slippery police chief. An overlooked gem.

The Black Book (aka Reign of Terror) - 9/10 - A really dark and nasty noir set in Revolutionary France, directed by Anthony Mann. John Alton's cinematography is amazingly claustrophobic and nightmarish, and the movie has a real sense of danger and violence to the whole thing. Great cast too, especially Arnold Moss (?) as the slippery police chief. An overlooked gem.

I like the film too, but why call it a noir? Why not call every black and white film of the 40s a noir? The distinctiveness (and therefore usefulness) of this term is quickly evaporating.

Logged

That's what you get, Drink, for not appreciating the genius of When You Read This Letter.

It has most of the conventions/cliches of noir: the photography of course, an amoral protagonist, a femme fatale, dirty cops, and so forth. It even has a few "car chases." It could just as easily have been set in the modern day.